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things i love: getting organized

I have a confession to make. I like Christmas but I really don’t like decorating. It involves two things I can’t stand; collections and clutter. Collections creep me out, so much so that I tend to be secretive about the commercialized things I like for fear that someone will pick up on it and force a collection on me. And, I have had my share of forced collections over the years ranging from Warner Brothers memorabilia, to wolves, to calendars. Recently, I accidently slipped up and shared a story from my childhood with Scott’s mom – now I have a box of rudolph stuff in the crawl space filled with pajamas, a stuffed toy with light up nose, figurines, and ornaments. That kind of thing is ok when I was a teenager. I’m 36 now…it’s weird. If I died tomorrow someone would uncover that box and put it out in a ‘estate’ sale and all the neighbors would be like, “wow, she REALLY had a thing for Rudolph huh?” Not really, no.

I find there is such a fine line between sprucing things up for the holidays and stressing out over all the additional crap lying around that needs to be placed just so, dusted, then put away. Just thinking about it was enough to stress me out this year and I set off on an organizational kick that lasted the better part of my time off work. I was all about tidying up the house. I cleaned out all of the closests, bought some bins for the clothes and toys Kaylee has outgrown, and finally figured out a solution for her growing collection of hats, shoes, & mittens – a shoe organizer over the door to the garage. Our hall closet is just too tiny to store more than a couple of coats and the rest of our accessories just ended up in various piles around the house. This solution is far from beautiful, but it’s not as much of an eye sore as I was anticipating. It certainly is practical. There is even room left over to fit all of our hats and gloves too.